Professionally, she started out as a teacher. She was employed at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana initially, but there she gave in to her bent for organized labor and was summarily fired along with ten other teachers for union activity. When the courts ordered the school to rehire all of the teachers, she was unavailable as she had quickly moved on to El Toro High School in El Toro, California (now called Lake Forest, California), where she remained for the rest of her career as an English teacher. While employed there, she was selected Orange County Teacher of the Year, a tribute in part to the work she'd done with remedial students for nearly a decade. She left education after thirteen and a half years when she sold her first novel, A Great Deliverance, to her longtime publisher Bantam Books.

After eighteen months outside of the classroom, she returned to teaching at the community college level, where she taught creative writing at Coastline Community College for several years before the calls of her career as a writer made it too difficult for her to be at home for the eighteen-week periods that the Coastline course required of her. At that point, she branched out into teaching an intensive writing seminar that she offered first at the University of Oklahoma and, since then, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. She has also taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, at the University of California in Irvine, at Irvine Valley College, and through Edinboro University's summer program at Exeter College in Oxford University.
She has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France's Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her novel A Great Deliverance, for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity Awards. She has also been awarded Germany's MIMI for her novel Well-Schooled in Murder.

Most of her novels have been filmed by for television by the BBC and have been broadcast in the US on PBS's MYSTERY.

Elizabeth George currently lives on Whidbey Island, Washington. She has two disobedient but nonetheless adorable miniature dachshunds: a long-haired named Titch (nicknamed the Burger) and a wire-haired named Lucy (nicknamed Lucy Bean the Drama Queen). She is married to Tom McCabe, a retired fire fighter.